Authority was up this week looking it over."
At Mile 498 we parked off the highway.
Across a swamp was a rank growth of spruce,
birch, and fern. It enclosed a blue-green
steaming pool: the field party's weekly bath
tub. "There are hot springs all through this
area," said Gord. "Waterfalls. Fantastic rock
piles-we call them hoodoos. The only people
who see them are geologists and bush pilots."
Northernmost Rockies a Primeval World
I had my last look at the Rockies in the
patched-up helicopter, swaying as in a Ferris
wheel while mountains slid out beneath us.
We followed the Gataga River, running like
spilt chocolate milk through mud flats.
The timber retreated. The alpine meadows
thinned. Snow whitened gullies and ridges,
and above them the cloud-surfed peaks reared
like reefs in a frozen sea. High on a barren
slope, four Stone sheep turned toward us
the black heads prized by big-game trophy
hunters; we were 200 miles beyond the north
ernmost range of the bighorn.
We landed on a snow-slabbed ridge to gas
up from a cache. Glaciers uncoiled from clefts
on every side. There was no pattern to the
ranges, no human associations. It was pre
historic chaos, as raw as a world in crucible.
The ridge was shale, patched with clumps
of yellow lichen,that strange internal partner
ship of an alga and a fungus, eroding the rock
with its acids a millimeter a century, creating
soil for a new succession of plant life. A piece
of shale cracked off and fell, lost forever to
the mountain. In a few eons, gravity, lichen,
frost, wind, and rain would level one of the
highest, hardest masses in the world.
The sense of mystery was strong: the mys
tery of this rock, a substance from the earth's
depths pushed skyward to sink again, like
tidal waves in infinitely slow motion. In the
grandeur of these northernmost Rocky Moun
tains, the most arrogant mind must sense its
temporalness. They confront us with the mys
tery of change, the challenge of adventure:
What lies beyond, beyond the next mountain
range, beyond the known?
THE END 393
FKTA HROMF; RY .IAMFCI. <TAN IFI n) (1 N r